In a little over 5 weeks from now I will be headed back to Nepal. I will be going to visit the Hillary School in Khumjung and trek to Gokyo Peak and Mt. Everest Base Camp. I am doing all of this to raise awareness for a charity I am involved in, Education Elevated. (Donate here!) We are raising money to follow-up our September 2009 trip to Chyangba village where we built a library for the current school. Next April (2011) we will go back to Chyangba and distribute the school uniforms and text books that your last round of donations purchased. We will also start a campaign to raise money for a new building to house the school. Thanks to all of you who have donated!

PS I’ll also be carrying in donated supplies for a high altitude health clinic. If you want to donate, you can pay me directly via PayPal and I will be bringing in over the counter drugs and medical supplies from Hong Kong.

I have just completed an amazing 8 day journey to the village of Chyangba in a remote mountain area of Nepal. Chyangba is a village of about 55 homes inhabited by the ethnic group called Sharpa. Most of you will know Sherpas as the folks who climb up to Mt. Everest, and several famous Sherpas come from Chyangba. My friend and guide in 2003 and 2008, Ngima Sherpa, comes from Chyangba and I was going to visit him. In addition, I was working with a charity called Education Elevated to help fix up a school and set up a library. While in Chyangba, I worked on the school and library for 4 days.

Getting to Chyangba

Getting to Chyangba is not easy. We had to fly on a 16 seat Twin Otter from Kathmandu to Phaplu. Phaplu has an “airport” consisting of a dirt strip and a dude with binoculars and a radio. After landing in Phaplu we trek a few hours (mostly in the dark) to our camp.

Our camp was visited by some local kids in the morning and had great views of the valley. We then trek the whole next day and finally arrive in Chyangba.

Visiting the School and Library

Upon arrival, all the school children were lined up waiting for us. We then walked around the school and library for a few hours and took hundreds of photos. Imagine hiking for 7 hours and going directly into a photo shoot. :)

The kids are super cute.

Project Planning

We start to size up the job ahead of us. Here is a photo of an empty room we will convert into the school library.

Being geeks we decide to be agile and use the scrum methodology. We decided we would re-assess the situation twice a day and see how far we get. We took stock of what furniture we had in the building (school desks, etc) and since we are MVP geeks, we decided to use a GUID system (globally uniquely identifier for Tanya and my mom, the only two non-techies I know who read my blog.) We put the benches into four categories: good enough, reinforce, take apart and put back together with some new wood, and ask Roger (the scrum master). Here is a photo of a school bench with GUID # 8.

Getting to Work

Roger the carpenter and general contractor (and scrum master) worked wonders. We computer geeks just hung around and he told us what to do. Before I knew it I was taking apart school chairs, benches, desks, etc, and rebuilding them. I got pretty good with a hammer.

We continued for a few days, constantly reassessing. I did not think we could fix all of the furniture in the four days we had as well as build a library (shelves, tables, and desks.) But Roger kept us on target. He did have electricity from 9:30am to about 2pm each day and was able to use a power saw. Awesome. But the kids were attracted to it like moths to the light, so I had to distract them by balancing wood on my head. As the week progressed I got better and was able to balance an entire bench on my head while standing on one foot (in the Dancing Shiva position for you Yogis.)

The kids started to imitate me.

Sprints 6 and 7

We did two sprints a day. Sprint 6 was on day 3 and we (mostly Roger) installed the shelves. We brought about 100 lbs of books and started to stack the shelves. After that some of us read to the kids and helped them practice counting in English.

Sprint 7 was awesome. We gave out all of the school uniforms to the kids. (In Nepal you can’t go to school if you don’t have a uniform.)

After we give out the uniforms, the kids all ran to change and then do a little dance for us. After we celebrate and I teach some of the kids the fist bump.

Leaving :(

After spending the last few hours with the kids and helping them read and count, we departed for a final meal at our campsite. The Sherpas cooked us a chocolate cake, I have no idea how they did that over a campfire. We then went to one of the local's house for a party and drank the local drinks: Chang and Roxi. They are evil drinks. Apparently it is a Sherpa custom to refill your drink immediately after you take a sip. I have no idea how much Chang I drank, but I think I can still feel it. We then turned the house into a Sherpa Disco and danced the night away to local music. (Sherpas can get down.)

The next day we had a final going away ceremony with the whole village and they put tons of Buddhist koda and flowers on us. Since we were mostly going down, we trekked the whole way back to Phaplu in one day. We treated ourselves to $5 a night hotel rooms and flew back to Kathmandu the next day.

This was a great experience, we spent a week in a local village, a village not even on the map, and made a difference. For geeks, we did the best we could-which was far more than I thought we could do. I hope that the tech community can donate a lot in small amounts, it only takes $10 to buy a school uniform or a few books so a kid can go to school. You can donate here. :)

Those of you who know me know that I love Nepal. My first of four visits to Nepal was in 2002 and I have been hooked ever since. My Everest expedition in 2003 changed my life and my base camp expedition in 2008 was my first time acting as a professional guide. We also raised over $20,000 for charity on that adventure. I am leaving tomorrow (Friday Sept 25th) on a new challenge: building a school and library in the remote village of Chyangba in Nepal. Chyangba is a special place since it is home to my lead (sidar) Sherpa, Ngima. Ngima just summated Mt. Everest for the first time in May. Ngima has been at my side each and every trip I have made to Nepal and he is family to me.

The village where he grew up, where his mother lives, and where most of the Sherpa he hires for my trips live is Chyangba. Last year volunteers built a school there. This year we raised enough money to get a lot of books and get every kid a uniform. Now we are building a library. The structure is mostly built, we are headed there for the next 10 days to complete the project.

Notice that 4 MVP are coming (including myself) representing 3.5 countries (since I am from USA but live in Hong Kong.) The four of us have decided to adopt Chyangba and will continue to return and donate to the village. I hope to create an endowment for the school and library and enable them to have internet access so the school in New York that we raised money for last year will be able to become a sister school and allow the kids to web cam each other. Next year we hope to bring running water to the village (we need $20,000 for that.)

I hope that as a community we can also help out. We are fortunate to have great jobs and great opportunity. When I told geeks in Germany this week at Basta! about my adventure, several handed me cash on the spot. (And due to the strength of the Euro it turns out to be a lot of money.) Individual members of Telerik have given me money as well and the company as a whole has supported my efforts. I spoke to the boys at arch-rival DevExpress and they are game too. If you want, you can donate here.

In addition to the 4 MVPs that are going, we have the organizers of the charity coming and Richard Campbell is bringing his wife and friend Roger from Vancouver. Roger is a carpenter, who brought about 90 lbs of tools and supplies. We spent all day today in Hong Kong looking for containers to pack the equipment in. (We found a good sturdy bag to get it all there.)

Every fall, the kids go back to school, the weather gets cooler, Munich kicks off its annual Oktoberfest festival, and the fall conference season heats up. It seems that I always miss Oktoberfest. I had friends who lived in Munich earlier this decade and each year my trips to Mt. Everest got in the way. Now that Telerik has a Munich office, I got to go to Oktoberfest (O#) with geeks. I can see the eyes rolling by the non-technical readers of this blog (basically my Mom is the only non-technical person who reads this blog), however, geeks can drink a lot, judging by how I had to crawl up the spiral staircase in my hotel room last night. (Yes you read that right. I also thought that European rooms were suppose to be small. I think that the staircase is a cruel joke for Oktoberfest and they only give the room to dumb, obnoxious Americans, but I digress.)

While I am here to talk about the future direction of OpenAccess and how to further evolve the WCF Wizard that I recently wrote a blog series on, we all will be headed up to Mainz for Basta 2009. Since the fall conference season is upon us, I figured I will outline here all of the events I will be speaking at this fall, plus a special trip to Nepal I want to tell you about.

This is my first Basta event, but many of my colleagues have spoken there for years (including fellow RDs and ex RDs Ingo Rammer, Markus Egger, and Christian Weyer.) and have raved about the passion of the audience. I’ll be speaking on scrum as well as doing a keynote on Silverlight’s line of business applications (this keynote will be one long demo.) Telerik is also going to be there, as a sponsor and with a booth. We have enough tee-shirts for every man, woman, and child at the conference. Should be fun!

Instead of going to Mt. Everest this year, I will be going to my sherpa’s home village and help construct a library for the local school. I am also going with a few other geeks like Richard Campbell, Kathleen Dollard, and Maciej Pilecki. We are raising money for the village and trying to set up an endowment. I would love to see the tech community help us. Since speakers don’t get paid for these events, my tagline this fall will be asking for geeks to donate to the cause. (Hey if people can “walk” for cancer, I can speak for a village.) More on this on a blog post later this week before I fly to Kathmandu, but you can sponsor here. I have to thank Telerik for being so supportive of this passion of mine.

DevReach is another passion of mine since the conference founder Martin Kulov reached out to me for help in planning the first ever DevReach in 2006. It is also how I met the Telerik boys. It is also how I discovered how beautiful Bulgarian women are. All of that said, it is a great show, now in our 4th year and of course Telerik is a huge sponsor and will have a great presence there. I’ll be doing the scrum session as well as Data Access Hacks and Shortcuts and Building RESTful Applications with Microsoft tools.

Fellow RD Tad Golonka, who is totally awesome, introduced me to the crazy country of Poland (also another land of beautiful women, seeing a trend??) Long story short, but if you remember I was the global recruiter for the Curing Cancer project, and one of the folks I hired was Szymon Kobalczyk (also recommended by Tad.) Szymon, who says I have changed his life (I just hope for the better!), runs the CodeCamp, so I could not say no! Talking scrum and data as well and I expect to have a great time.

This will be my 12th year of speaking at SDC (something like 15 events) and my first SDC was back in May 1998. The SDC took a chance on a young inexperienced speaker (I only spoke at a few Advisor DevCons in the United States before then) and I am forever grateful. To be honest, I have no idea why the Dutch like me so much, I constantly show up for sessions drunk (one year they even put the word “Beer” in my session title (start listening at 22 minutes in)) and insult Dutch people. I got very drunk and very abusive in 2007 and they made me do a keynote in 2008. I guess I am not learning. That said, I will be back with the usual cast of characters. This is my favorite event of the year.

This will be my first time speaking at Tech*Days in Hong Kong. There are usually a few thousand folks at this event and I will doing a session called “Sharing Code between .NET and Silverlight” as well as my Daily Scrum talk. Looking forward to this one!

After setting a TechEd record of doing 10 sessions last year (only to break that record and do 11 in LA this year), the TechEd Europe organizers figured that they had enough of me and only assigned me 2 sessions (Estimation and “Agile Tools and Teams”.) I lost track, but I think this is my 10th TechEd in Europe! Telerik will be there in force with a booth and developers staffing the booth. This should be a great event.

While PDC is pretty much a Microsoft only speaker event talking about future technology, Joel and I will be doing a BOF session on Agile Tools and Teams. Basically a repeat of our BOF at TechEd in LA (and my session in Berlin. Watch this related video.) Telerik will be at the PDC in full force, as a sponsor and with a booth. Known for great software and also awesome must have t-shirts, we will have over 1,000 copies of our new t-shirt, making its debut at PDC. Stop by the booth for that (as well as .NET Ninjas, Geeketts, and some others.) Also Telerik will be unveiling its newest product and will have demos all week will give away licenses.

That is a lot of events, but it will be great! Hope to see you at one (or all)!

Three and a half years ago I scaled my first peak in the Catskills and was hooked to get into the exclusive Catskill 3500 club. The 3500 club is someone who has climbed all 35 peaks of 3500 feet elevation in the Catskills, including 4 of them twice in the winter. You may say, that is easy, but considering that 18 or so of them are trail less and the Catskills can have a foot of snow as early as October 1 and as late as May 1.

WILD ANIMUS is a novel set on the West Coast of North America, from Los Angeles through Portland and Seattle up to Fairbanks, Alaska, and the wilderness beyond. The text reads like a naturalist's impressions of climbing Mt. Rainier, the Cascades, Mt. McKinley, and ultimately Alaska's remote volcano, Mt. Wrangell. The vivid descriptions of the botany and weather found at these high altitudes are a breathtaking combination of fire and ice.

WILD ANIMUS was written, in part, during author Rich Shapero's 400-mile solo trek through treacherous mountain terrain. Set in the late 1960s and early '70s, it is an acid-tinged climb through some of the most forbidding territory on the planet, and ultimately asks, "Which is more precious, a person's life or his vision?" Today he is guest writing on my blog, I hope that you will add lots of comments:

Ransom Altman, the protagonist of my novel, WILD ANIMUS, is a mountain climber who's not satisfied merely to summit peaks. He's on a quest for a level of meaning and truth accessible only in the wildest corners of the globe, and ultimately, he ascends Alaska's Mt. Wrangell with a single-minded purpose: to reunite himself with what he imagines to be "the source of love," his god, whom he calls "Animus."

Ransom's quest encourages climbers to ponder, "What it is that drives me, often at great risk, toward the summit?" And, "As I climb, am I running away from something, or towards it?" What is it that drives you toward the summit?

I've made an excerpt from WILD ANIMUS available online. It's called "Confrontation on Mt. Wrangell" and presents a scene where the climbing party must decide whether to take a dangerous route to the summit or less risky route that means they won't be able to summit the mountain on this expedition. What would you do? Here's a link to the excerpt:

On Saturday I reached the summit of the trail-less peak FirMountain. I am now only a few peaks away (4 peaks, 2 hikes) away from reaching membership to the Catskill 3500 Club.

The Catskill 3500 is a club where if you hiked the 35 peaks in the Catskill Range that are above 3500' in elevation. How do you get to 39 you ask? You have to do 4 of the peaks twice, in the winter time.

I should get in early next year! I have been working on them since February 2002. These hikes have been very rewarding and the views have been great!

Dad is nagging me to take him hiking in the Catskills, Slide Mountain on snowshoes will be the first peak I do after I get the other 4. Hope to see some of you there...

You climber snobs may say 3500' that’s it? To you I say become a member of the 3500 club and get back to me. :) Some of these climbs were just as challanging as any day on Kilimanjaro (except the last two days).

Mt. Rainier had a 3.2 earthquake yesterday-one mile below the surface of the crater. Mt. St. Helens had a similar earthquake before is started to spew last month, but scientists say the two events are not linked. But five quakes greater than magnitude 2.0 were recorded Oct. 25-31-the same kind of activity on Mt. St. Helens.

I am just glad that I got to the top of Rainier this summer since if it goes, it will go big. I think it may go soon, it has been waiting 150 years. You heard it here first....

More bad news from this climbing season. The 7th person died on Mt. Rainier this year on October 25th. What is worse is that this is the first person do die this season on the Camp Muir side of the mountain. Two locals were hiking across a crevasse on Ingraham Glacier, 11,000 feet up the 14,411-foot mountain, near Disappointment Cleaver, when an avalanche hit. One guy had only his had free and dug himself to safety, but could not help his buddy at all. I camped at Ingraham Glacier at the foot of Disappointment Cleaver. :(

So I am back and alive from Alaska. We were snowed in for a few days and I missed a slew of flights (and conferences) but the worst that really happened to me was a bad sunburn.

The climb was great. We all had to rope up just in case we fell into a crevasse and needed to be rescued by our fellow climbers. We had to break trail in snow up to our hips and sometimes up to our armpits.

The nation's tallest volcano and the continental US' second highest peak, Mt.Raineris a great climb. I plan to stand on the summit and look at the beautiful Pacific Northwest this July.

While I like to climb this mountain (my photos from my trip up Rainer last year are here), it is also one that at over 14,000' demands tremendous respect. Whenever I fly into Seattle (which oddly is quite often) you can see it standing there all menacing above the clouds. On Saturday two climbers from the east coast tried to summit Rainer. The climbers were stranded at 12,300 feet from Saturday to Monday on a 45-degree slope with steep and rocky terrain above and below them. The climber who died fell 30 feet early Saturday on Liberty Ridge -- one of the most difficult routes up the 14,410-foot mountain. His climbing partner was able to reach him, set up a tent and call for help on a cell phone. A dramatic rescue happened on Monday, but unfortunately the climber died in the hospital.

A sad day for my sport and a great peak. My thoughts go out to the climber and his family today.

One of the coolest places I have even been to, Aguas Calientes at the foot of Machu Piccu , was hit by a big mudslide. The rail link was covered and hundreds of tourists are stranded and 11 people died.

This is sad since it is the only town around. It is a 5 day trek to Cusco over a 13,000 pass. I'll be thinking about eveyone down there this weekend.

In 1985, two British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates became the first climbers to summit Siula Grande (appx 22,000’) in the Peruvian Andes. On the way down Joe took a bad fall and broke his leg very badly. Simon who should have left Joe attempted an amazing rescue effort. Simon tied two ropes together and lowered Joe 300 feet at a time. While on belay, Joe fell off a cliff and was hanging while Simon’s anchor was getting more and more unstable. At some point Simon made the very difficult (but correct) decision to cut the rope. Joe fell into a crevasse and was presumed dead.

Simon made the very difficult solo descent back to their base camp. Joe meanwhile with a broken leg and no food or water climbed out of the crevasse with his two ice tools (what most people would call an ice axe, but an ice axe is actually something different) and only 1 good leg. This was an amazing climb, probably the most amazing one in all of rock/ice climbing history.

The movie Touching the Void, documents this heroic and epic ascent, rescue effort and Joe’s climb out of the crevasse and days long crawl over the glacier back to base camp. Went to see it last night with Linda and John and lets just say we were all pretty moved. The strength and courage to stay alive and never give up was very motivating. It also reminded me of the lessons I learned on Everest, both in climbing and living your life. Somehow after seeing this movie the little things in life that bog your down don’t seem to matter all that much.

I speak at lots of developer conferences around the world each year. Last year I spoke in front of over 20,000 people at over 15 events on 4 different continents. Besides making many new friends and visiting awesome places, the most rewarding thing about speaking is meeting developers and trying to help solve their problems. I remember still helping a young developer in Kuala Lumpur last year (along with Fernando) with the DTS Package from Hell. She came to me with it printed out and we spent a long time fine tuning it. (If you are reading this, please drop me a line and let me know if it all worked out!)

A lot of people ask me how I became a “famous” international conference speaker. I tell them to have no fear of:

Speaking in front of large crowds (the #1 fear in the USA is public speaking, #2 is death, so the person giving the Eulogy at the next funeral you go to is worse off than the dead guy)

Flying

Admitting that you are not smarter than your audience and that the only reason why you are on stage is that you made every mistake in the book and are willing to admit it

Also you need someone somewhere to take a chance on you. That is what the folks at Advisor did about 7 or 8 years ago when they selected me to speak at one of their events. For that reason I have always “returned home” and spoken at an Advisor DevCon every year. Actually the last time I missed an Advisor DevCon, was the spring of 1999 (my girlfriend was in college, now I feel old).

This year, I am climbing up Mt. Rainer again with Kevin and Gary from my Everest trip. We are going to sleep in the actual crater, kept warm by the volcano’s heat. We are doing this ourselves (Not to help the evil RMI.) Unfortunately it conflicts with the dates of the next Advisor DevCon taking place in Las Vegas from June 6th to 10th. Good speaking buddies like Ken Getz and Tom Howe are always headlines as well as folks from Microsoft like Robert Green (who has been speaking at DevCon for as long as I have been going-which is 1996).

So go check it out. You can read about my hike up Rainer in the blog, but will miss the content at DevCon forever. J